I got a call from a friend the other day, a prominent literary critic and essayist, who said she was at her wits’ end. All she hears from her circle of friends in her very blue state is unrelenting denunciations of the U.S. president and his supporters, which is more than half the country.
It was already bad in the past, she said, but these six weeks have turned up the volume to 11 and beyond, even to the breaking point. It’s completely out of control, to the point that even the sight of an American flag causes revulsion among many.
I asked: What is the answer? She said plainly that the hate has to stop before it permanently corrupts the souls of those people who come to abide in it, and utterly destroys whatever remains of community functioning. People desperately need to detach from their addiction to hate.
The plot device involves what’s called an “unreliable narrator.” Many of the details as relayed by this attorney, in whose voice the novel is written, about the life of the respected Dr. Jekyll don’t quite make sense. The potion that Jekyll drank is never explained and doesn’t quite check out. The timelines are mixed up and the evil deeds of the protagonist are unverified.
At some point while reading, I realized that none of this ever happened, and not because it is fiction, but because the entire story is not literal but allegorical. It happened in the imagination. It is the story of the soul and what corrupts it.
Recall that Dr. Jekyll becomes exhausted of his earnest reputation and ways, fed up with always being the most highly regarded and moral man in the community. He stumbles up a potion in his lab and drinks it. It turns him into a different person, Mr. Hyde, one who walks the streets at night doing unspeakable things, with details left unsaid so that the imagination is allowed to fill in the blanks. He comes out of this induced fit and returns to his previous demeanor, job, and high status in the community.
Here we have a paradigmatic Victorian concern: What to do with the evil that lurks beneath? What if the attempt to stamp it out only drives it underground and makes it more dangerous? Dr. Jekyll turned to a potion to test it out and reveal his evil inner drives.
In the story, however, a problem develops. As it turns out, the good doctor is drawn to his evil side. He could of course have eschewed the potion completely, never touching it again. Instead he looks for occasions to drink it, even routinely and increasingly.
Each time he drinks, the longer it requires for normalcy to return. The potion ends up drawing him further and further away from Dr. Jekyll and ever closer to Mr. Hyde. As time goes on, he is ever less able to shake off the evil. And you know how it ends: he finally becomes fully evil and dies of a corrupted, corroded, and completely destroyed body and soul, discovered dead in his lab.
You see the literary device here. The point is to underscore the peculiar internal dynamic in which evil works on the human mind, body, and spirit. Indulging it feels good in some measure, but the more one allows for it under any excuse, especially when it is focused on showing malice toward others, the more it becomes self-destructive and likely ends fatally.
Turning back to contemporary politics, many people are wondering what is going on with the Democrats and their wild antics, their signs, their disrespect toward all established protocols, their cringy videos, their unhinged rhetoric and rants, and their dogmatic and hard core unity in voting against all things, even those that make sense, such as cutting waste or approving competent agency heads.
Just so that we understand: I’m not singling out Democrats here, and there are surely people on the other side as much in danger of what I’m describing. As the Victorian novel reveals, this is a very human condition. I’m merely offering an explanation for why Democrats in particular might be experiencing institutional collapse.
It may trace to a psychological/spiritual force—the corrosive effects of abiding in too much hate for too long. Hate is like a poison that spreads, invades, consumes, and pushes out all goodness, decency, and light until it is finally fateful for its practitioners.
This was the underlying lesson of Jekyll and Hyde; he drank the poison so often because he came to like it, indulging in the thrill of being bad, and, at some point, could not revert.
This path for the Democrats probably began from 2009 to 2017, under President Obama, who was supposed to be a uniter of people. But it was in this period when the prevailing ethos inched ever closer toward actual race division and hatred.
DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) took hold in business, government, and academia, with its aggressive discrimination, unapologetic quotas, and claims of institutionalized and systemic racism that simply cannot be willed away by any individual. Anyone who complained was marked as uncomprehending, not on the team, and probably dangerous.
This tendency to practice the personal politics of scapegoating, loathing, and hate was fully unleashed in 2016 with the ascendance of Trump, who became a singular focal point. It didn’t stop there because the haters had to figure out why they could not ruin him. The reason: his supporters, who then became the main object of opposition and loathing.
The people who supported him were called deplorable and much worse. Over time, it went further, not just to the supporters but the system that gives them voice. They then turned against free speech, then freedom, then democracy, then Western systems of government. The immigration system was deployed to supplant bad voters with more reliable ones. The potion penetrated so deeply that there was no going back.
There was a strange way in which COVID years were nothing but the instantiation of this malign motive with the wholly unjustified closures of businesses and houses of worship. At some point, this was no longer mistaken public-health policy but an active and partisan effort to stamp out what those in charge did not like, which was not the virus but the supporters of you know who.
It took the ultimate turn in finally targeting the next generation for maximum demoralization and disability. Kids were removed from school, masked, and finally injected with absolutely no justification at all.
Yes, I know, it is a creepy theory, but the effects of too much mental energy spent on hating always ends this way. Every spiritual leader has taught this. “Hate is just as injurious to the hater as it is to the hated,” said MLK Jr., but he could have added: and sometimes vastly more injurious to the hater.
Again, I don’t intend to single out one ideology and one party. Every group is vulnerable to this, and there are surely plenty of haters among Republicans and on the right as well (if these terms even have meaning anymore).
The point is that we’ve heard for years, and correctly, about the problem of hate in America. There is some strange foreshadowing when a campaign like this takes place on a large scale: it could be a preparation to inure the accuser against suspicions that he is an expert practitioner of that very thing. That might be what is happening here.
As we’ve watched civil society unravel over these years, we’ve seen ever more expressions of this. We do well to recall the lesson that Jekyll and Hyde teaches: too much indulgence in wishing evil on others ends up backfiring on ourselves. The emotion of hate is extremely powerful, clouds judgment, drives out virtue, and corrodes the moral sense. The only way to end this process is to stop—put away the potion and let the body and soul heal.
That is precisely what the country needs. I’ve recently seen some evidence that mainstream journalistic venues have tried to dial back on the demonization of Trump supporters and seek instead to understand their legitimate concerns, even to the point of looking inward at what they might have overlooked. This is essential and cannot happen soon enough.
As my friend suggested, the current track of nonstop demonization of others, extending from an inner sense of hate, simply is not working. No one wants to live this way. We all, regardless of our biases or loyalties, need to do better at understanding others’ points of view. We might never succeed, but at least the attempt puts loathing on the back burner long enough to perhaps repair our shattered communities and lives.
